ISTANBUL, March 5 Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan, embroiled in a scandal over leaked voice recordings,
said on Wednesday his sensitive conversations with other world
leaders may have been tapped as part of a campaign by his
political enemies to discredit him.

Erdogan is locked in a power struggle with U.S.-based
Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally he says is behind
a stream of "fabricated" recordings aired on the Internet and
purportedly revealing corruption in his inner circle.

Four more recordings have appeared on YouTube this week,
part of what the prime minister sees as a campaign to sully his
ruling centre-right AK Party before local elections on March 30
and a presidential poll due later this year.

"I talked to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin last night.
Only international intelligence agencies are curious about the
content of such a phone call. But here in Turkey, a prosecutor
can prepare an arbitrary indictment and tap into such a call."

Government officials say Gulen's Hizmet network has built
covert influence in the police and judiciary over decades and
has been illegally tapping thousands of telephones for years to
concoct criminal cases against its enemies and try to influence
government affairs. Gulen has denied the accusations.

The tapping of calls with foreign leaders could prove
embarrassing for Turkey, recalling the furore caused by former
U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden's leaks suggesting the
agency had monitored phone conversations of dozens of foreign
leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Erdogan - who has responded to the corruption scandal by
reassigning thousands of police officers, asserting more
government control of the courts and tightening Internet
restrictions - suggested he expected more leaks, potentially of
a more personal nature.

"I want to stress that there is not only wiretapping, but
visuals are also being carried out," he said.

"Taking pictures and videos of family relations, or
relations outside the family, violates all privacy rules. And if
these images give you the right to publish these materials on
social media, I am sorry but I don't accept such an Internet."

DEFIANT

One of the voice recordings, posted late on Monday, purports
to be of Erdogan urging his justice minister to speed up a court
case against Aydin Dogan, head of a family-run conglomerate seen
as part of a secular elite which has had an often tense
relationship with his Islamist-rooted government.

Dogan said in a statement on the front page of its newspaper
Hurriyet that the conversation, if true, would mark a "clear
interference in the judicial process" that it said risked
shaking trust in the rule of law in Turkey.

Erdogan defended the conversation on Wednesday.

"What can be more natural than telling my justice minister
to follow a case closely. The Capital Markets Board presented me
with dangerous information ... It requires me to instruct to
follow the case closely," he said.

Erdogan and his aides have dismissed the leaks as part of a
"montage", snippets of conversations illegally wiretapped over a
period of years and spliced together out of context to make them
sound as incriminating as possible.

At a series of election rallies in recent days, Erdogan has
rounded on the Gulen movement in front of crowds of fervent
supporters, vowing to make them pay for what he has repeatedly
cast as an "attempted coup".

His core supporters in AK Party's conservative Anatolian
heartland show no sign of wavering, apparently reluctant to
believe the allegations against Erdogan or seeing government
graft as a small price to pay for a sharp rise in living
standards he has overseen during his 11 years in office.

"Let them put together phone calls, do any dubbing or
montage and release them. My people don't give any credence to
these tapes," Erdogan said.
(Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Dec 9 Samsung Electronics Co Ltd
said on Friday that a software update for Galaxy Note 7
smartphones will be released mid-December in the United States
preventing them from charging and functioning as mobile phones,
rendering them useless.

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